Game designer Zoë Quinn's memoir Crash Override: How To Save The Internet From Itself isn't published for another year, but it's already a hot property. Multiple movie and TV studios have just been involved in a bidding war for the book's screen rights, with the eventual winner Amy Pascal, through her Pascal Pictures banner. Of the actresses immediately circling the project, Deadline's sources say Scarlett Johansson is the keenest to play Quinn.
Gamergate, should you be lucky enough to have missed it, was a complicated storm in the internet's teacup, ostensibly about exposing corruption in videogames journalism. In reality it was a misogynist lynch-mob operating from the likes of 4Chan, Twitter and Reddit, actively seeking to keep women out of videogames, principally through the use of smear campaigns and promises of violence.
Quinn provoked the ire of the furious trolls when she produced the game Depression Quest and her ex-boyfriend wrote a blog about her, accusing her of sleeping with journalists in exchange for good reviews. The blog went viral, sparking the whole Gamergate farrago, which targeted Quinn, feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian, game developer Brianna Wu and many others (all women). Quinn was eventually forced out of her home due to the constant threats. Her book is about her fight back: "a very inside look at gaming and nerd culture and what happens when one gets caught in the gears of that machine", runs the blurb.
“Gaming and internet message boards used to be niche interests, mostly for young men," is Quinn's own explanation. "In the past few years, however, they’ve gone mainstream. Millions of people — including women and other marginalised people — have taken an interest in the platforms, image boards, and discussion forums that once belonged by default to a much smaller population. Most gamers give zero fucks about this. Like the rest of us, they’re just here to play games. But a vocal minority are clinging onto the exclusionary identity ‘hardcore gamer,’ muttering ‘fuckin casuals’ under their breath.”
Pascal picking up the project is deliciously appropriate given that her company is also behind the new Ghostbusters starring Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy. You can already imagine the apoplectic keyboard-warrior rage. Newcomers Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum will write the screenplay, with Pascal Pictures financing the initial development. Sony are expected to take the project on further down the line.
Crash Override: How To Save The Internet From Itself will be published next autumn by Simon & Schuster.